Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Origin of the Theses

Michael Medved is concerned. The American Religion Identification Survey (ARIS) released yesterday, shows that 15% of Americans do not identify with any religion, up from 8% in 1990. As a believer in the power of religion to inculcate moral rectitude in the populace, this worries him. So he invited anyone who thinks it is a positive development to debate with him on the Michael Medved radio show.

He gave one agnostic caller an evolutionary argument. Natural selection, he reasoned, applies to ideas as well as animals. Ideas, like biological traits, can only survive if they provide some advantage to those who believe them. Since religion is one of the oldest ideas out there, it must be one of the most advantageous.

There are three fallacies in this argument.

First, the argument is a faulty analogy. This fallacy consists of incorrectly assuming that because two things, organisms and ideas in this case, are similar in one way, they must be similar in another. Organisms and ideas both evolve, but it does not follow that survival of the fittest is the mechanism in both cases. Lots of incredibly unfit ideas survive for generations – transubstantiation, for instance, or the minimum wage.

Second, the argument is a form of the appeal to tradition. This fallacy consists in assuming that something must be better simply because it is time-honored. Accepting, for the sake of argument, Mr. Medved's premise that natural selection applies to ideas, then a new idea, like atheism is sometimes superior to an old one, like religion - just as a new species, like cro magnon man, is sometimes superior to an old one, like Neanderthal man. In fact, the thrust of the evolving ideas argument is that new and improved ideas will from time to time displace old and established ones.

Third, the argument is a stolen concept. This fallacy consists in selectively accepting a premise that you otherwise reject. Mr. Medved rejects evolution; he is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an organization devoted to promoting the theory of Intelligent Design. If he does not believe that natural selection explains the origin of the species, it is not logical for him to draw an analogy (faulty or otherwise) to the origin of the theses. The Logic Critic gives Michael Medved…

Genuine and structured reasoning, but with fallacies or factual errors in main argument.2 Blades - Wrong.

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